Run Chrome OS on a Virtual Machine

Although Hexxeh recommends USB images for the best experience, the easiest way to try out Chromium OS without even rebooting your computer is running it as a virtual machine. More importantly, since Chromium OS will not run on all hardware, this is the way to go if you’ve got an incompatible machine and just want to give it a quick look.

Extract the image file using an application like 7-Zip or WinRAR, so you get a .vdi file.

Open VirtualBox and create a new virtual machine using any name you like. Under OS Type, select Linux as the operating system and leave Ubuntu as the operating system version.

Next you’ll have to set the amount of memory that will be allocated for the virtual machine. For our test we just left it at 512MB, which seemed adequate, but you can ramp it up a little if wanted.

In the next screen choose “use existing hard drive” and click on the explore folder to the right. Select the .vdi file extracted on step 2, then click next through the rest of the screens and you’re done. You can start the virtual machine and begin using Chromium OS right away.